


The Best I Never Had

by puppyfacedbrokenboys



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, High School Reunion, M/M, based off the movie 10 Years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 21:24:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1402930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puppyfacedbrokenboys/pseuds/puppyfacedbrokenboys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Puck had never been so happy to have such meddling friends in his life.</p>
<p>(10 year high school reunion. Angst. Fluff? Santana and Kurt make an appearance.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Best I Never Had

**Author's Note:**

> Actually written on Dec 27, 2012
> 
> Based off of the movie 10 Years. One of the characters sang a song and it gave me all these feels and this happened.
> 
> Song that Puck sings is [Never Had](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URchUjgghb0) by Oscar Isaac (with a few changed lyrics)

Puck had always had a thing for Blaine in high school. But, at the time, Blaine was with Kurt and Puck couldn’t dare to come between those two. They were so perfect for each other. Blaine and Puck had grown pretty close their senior year as friends after having ended up with most of the same classes. It was enough for Puck to be able to be that close, to be one of Blaine’s friends, but it was never quite close enough.

After they all graduated, Puck split off to LA and never came home. He lost track of all his friends and threw himself into a music career where he could play guitar all the time and write his own stuff.

Then he wrote this—in the span of an hour after a gig in a ratty motel that he could barely scrap up the money for at the time—the words just pouring out of his heart onto the paper. The writing of the song itself only took a half hour. But after Puck stopped and sat back, blinking down at the paper, he was left with three whole pages of words that could only be about one person. Words that described a curly-head of hair, matted down with gel, wide and sparkling hazel eyes, a beautiful smile, and the worst wardrobe a teenager could wear.

He smiled softly down at the pages, sniffling as he ran a sleeve clad arm over his cheeks that were damp…

Somehow, in the middle of all the gibberish that Puck wrote, there was a song… one of the most raw and heartfelt songs Puck had ever written. He spent the next half hour getting the melody down. The melody flowed from his fingers as if it was already written for him… then he locked the lyrics away in his suitcase and never let them see the light of day again.

Until now.

Now that Puck’s sitting here, on this bar stool in the middle of Breadstix at his ten year high school reunion, singing his song that was never supposed to be released, he was reminded of a time when two boys sat on the bed next to each other, guitars slung over their shoulders. The shorter boy was strumming aimlessly at the strings as Puck was cleaning the neck of his guitar… Puck watching as his fingers danced along the neck, making the notes as the boy stared into space, never knowing that they’d become so important in the future…

It was the same melody.

His voice caught as the realization crashed over him. He gripped his guitar a little tighter as not to drop it and tried to keep his voice steady. He kept his eyes closed, letting the words flow through his body and wanting to kill Santana for making him do this, urging their “resident rockstar” to serenade them all with a new song.

Just like old times, right?

But no… these were his words now. They were raw, and not from some other artist that he could hide behind and impersonate. No, this was raw, vulnerable emotion… just Noah Puckerman and his guitar, laying himself bare to his audience that he hadn’t even seen since graduation.

And once he hit the part about the yellow pants, he heard a small gasp from the audience, knowing exactly who that owner was, but he still kept his eyes closed.

“ _And I hope this song I’m singing someday finds you… wherever you may be_ ,” Puck croons through the mic in a choked voice. Then, when he blinks and his vision is cleared of tears, Puck finds himself staring right at a pair of wide hazel eyes, no longer as bright, but still sparkling through tears… staring right at the person in which this song was written about all those years ago.

Wow, Puck had never seen anything more beautiful… but then it all shattered as Blaine dropped his gaze. Puck struggled to keep his composure, unable to look away as he powered through the last chorus, putting as much emotion and heartbreak into the words as he could. His heart ripped open, his soul bleeding out as he tried to will Blaine to look back at him.

“ _I know now and I just can’t forget; you’re the best I never had_.”

But he didn’t. Once the last note rang through the air, the room was dead silent. Then there was a choked sob and a chair had fallen, and Blaine was rushing out towards the exit. A weak round of applause started up after that before the chatter from earlier started up again.

Puck was frozen to the spot, and was quickly enveloped into a pair of warm arms. Puck knew it was Santana immediately, her midnight pomegranate perfume filling his nostrils as a broken sob broke through his lips pressed against her neck. She was soothing her hands comfortingly over his shaven head, murmuring soothingly words in Spanish into his ear. He couldn’t hear her, but the constant hum of her voice helped his harsh breathing slow enough to be able to pull back and wipe the tears from his eyes. He hoped no one had noticed.

"I blew it, didn’t I?" he questioned, not daring to look up at her probably pitying face.

"No, you didn’t."

He wasn’t answered by her, though. The answer surprisingly came from behind him… and from the last person he had expected. He knew who the voice belonged to, but he needed to turn around just to be sure. There, standing before him was a slightly taller, more built but still lean Kurt Hummel. Puck must have been staring at him in disbelief, because the other man chuckled at him.

"You heard me right, Puckerman. You didn’t blow it," he said, walking forward so he could rest his hand on Puck’s shoulder. "You did exactly the right thing. The thing that you both need… he’s just now realizing it." A sad smile appeared on his face as he gave Puck’s shoulder a squeeze.

Puck stared up at him dumbly, jaw hanging open in shock. Kurt shook his head with a sigh.

"Do I have to spell it out for you? C’mon, Puckerman, ten years and you’re still as slow as you were." Kurt paused to fix the cufflink of his… very expensive suit, a suit from the designer that he works for now. "He loves you… always had, even though I tried so hard to deny it. He was absolutely crushed when you took off after high school without so much as a goodbye. I took pity on him, naively hoping that it was just  _missing-your-best-friend_  blues… but he didn’t snap out of it for six months.

"I finally let him go, getting fed up for, obviously, not being the one for him. It was pretty nasty, all yelling, and then he finally broke, sobbing and telling me that he was sorry, that he couldn’t help that he couldn’t return my love anymore… I told him it was okay. I would never begrudge him for sticking it out, because I had done the same thing. I understood. We parted on nice terms the Christmas after high school. But I was worried about him.

"He followed your career like a crazed fangirl, but whenever you came to New York to do a show, he’d never go. He never had the courage, thinking that you’d never love him like he loves you. But I knew. I saw how you two were… like two sides of one coin. I was jealous… and I knew that when the time came he’d leave me for you… but I kept a hold of him for as long as I could… and I thank you for that, but I also wish you hadn’t. Because you two need each other. I don’t know what it is, but you give him something that I knew I never could." He paused, crossing his arms over his chest as he turned stern eyes on Puck.

"So, Puckerman, do me a big favor and take that chance you never could and go get him. Because if you don’t, you’d break his heart, and I really don’t want to have to pulverize you for breaking my best friend’s heart again." Then he turned around and slid into the conversation that Mercedes was having with Bubba the football player… Shane, Puck thought his name was.

He was startled when Santana took the guitar from his hands and laid it gently on the floor, stepping around it to grip Puck by the shoulders roughly. “You heard him,” she nearly shouted in his face. “He pretty much just gave you his blessing to go sweep his ex off his feet. And that said ex, the one you just broke my heart by singing about, is in love with you too. So go woo his ass, Puckerman!” She spun him around and frog-marched him to the door, where she then pushed open the door and bodily pushed him through it.

That’s how Puck found himself in the warm summer night air, staring at a filled parking lot. He spun around towards the door, and peered through the glass with a glare where Santana still stood, smirking at him.

A small gasp alerted him to another presence off to his side and he froze, before spinning slowly on his heel to peer at the small brick wall next to the door. He dragged his gaze up from the ground to follow suit clad legs and torso up to a tear-stained face with glasses and short curly hair. Gel-free hair.

Watery hazel eyes met brown, and Blaine let out a choked sob from behind the hand over his lips. Puck felt his heart tug at the sight, not knowing how to interpret the crying mess in front of him… but knowing that Blaine was still the most beautiful person Puck had ever laid eyes on. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his own black dress pants and opened his mouth to say something, but what he didn’t know. To apologize? To confess his undying love some more? To tell Blaine that this was a mistake and that, yes, the song was about him, but he was never meant to hear it?

But Blaine lowered his hands slowly from his mouth, taking a deep breath before saving Puck from making things worse by talking. “How long?” he asked, so quietly that it was as if his voice floated on the close-to-midnight summer air just to make it to Puck’s ears.

The question wasn’t specific, but Puck knew exactly what Blaine was referring to. When had he realized… when had he wrote that song. Puck took a deep breath and let it out, long and heavy. He ran both hands over his head as he tried to get his words straight in his brain. “Three months after graduation. I was sitting in a dark and dirty motel room that I had scraped the cash up for from the tips from the gig I had played earlier. I didn’t even know what I was doing until I looked down and there it was. Then I picked up my guitar and—”

Blaine cut him off. “I knew that melody was familiar once you started,” he said, hollowly as if he was tired and had cried every last feeling he had from his body. 

Puck swallowed hard, stilling his hands as he finally looked Blaine in the eye. “I promise you, it  _wasn’t_ supposed to be like that. I didn’t even realize that it used to be your warm up tune until I sat down behind that mic tonight. You have to believe me.”

Reluctantly, Blaine nodded, looking up at Puck with an expression that just conveyed that whether Blaine liked it or not, he trusted everything that Puck was saying. That Puck could say anything and Blaine would believe him.

The look gave Puck courage, and he surged forward and sat down next to Blaine, staring out at the light post that shone over the parking lot. “That song… it was never supposed to be played. I wrote it, and then I locked it away.”

Blaine nudged Puck with his shoulder lightly, and Puck turned his attention to see a small smile on Blaine’s face as he shook his head. A small scoff fell from his lips as he looked back up at Puck. “That’s not what your song said.”

Then he looked away, standing up and running a hand through his hair. He was turned away from Puck as he brushed his sleeve over his face, another small laugh of nerves falling from his lips. “You know,” he began in a soft voice, turning back to Puck, “I had always wanted to be the one that you sang a song about… I had always dreamt about it, even back in high school. All I wanted was to see you singing from your heart, and me being the one that you couldn’t look away from. But I gave up on that dream. And, when I saw you tonight.” He looked up then, giving Puck another smile, this one slightly crooked. “I had this rush of  _maybe this could happen_ … and then it did… and I just couldn’t believe it… and I still don’t.”

"Well, you can blame Santana for that one…" Puck grumbled, and he stood up across from Blaine now. Something was screaming at him to just take him into his arms, but Puck resisted, wanting Blaine to initiate anything more so he didn’t royally mess up some more.

"Oh, I think I will," Blaine teased, looking up at Puck through his way too long eyelashes, taking a small step forward. "Because, otherwise, we’d both go back to loving each other and thinking the other didn’t… and, I don’t know about you, but I would fucking hate to go back to that." He took another step forward, and much to Puck’s shock, reached out and took Puck’s hand.

They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Blaine gave a small tug and suddenly Puck was surging forward and lips were touching and hands groping at clothing and hips and chests flushed together and tongues caressing each other.

“ _Finally_! Oh my god, you guys move slower than molasses,” was shouted behind them, and Blaine moved a hand to flick off Kurt, the other man giving out an indignant squeak as Santana’s laughter filled the air.

But instead of breaking off from Puck, Blaine deepened the kiss and Puck finally got what he had dreamed of since high school. Sounding over the soft moans that Blaine made, Puck could hear a muffle cheer surge through the restaurant.

He had never been so happy to have such meddling friends in his life. 


End file.
